Fig. 5

Early intravenous MSCs infusion alters splenic cytokine expression following SCI. Adult female Wistar rats (∼ 250 g) received a C7 35-g clip-compression injury and 2.5 × 10⁶ human umbilical cord matrix cells (HUCMCs) were infused 1 h following SCI (a). The surface antigen expression profile of MSC markers was assessed with immunocytochemistry in HUCMCs at passage 7. Representative images were taken at × 20 with the Nikon C2+ microscope (b). Scale bar = 10 μm. Splenic cytokines were assessed using the rat cytokine R&D ELISA Proteome Profiler array (ARY008) between vehicle and HUCMC-treated animals. A representative heat map, showing the four replicates (mean gray values), was generated using the BROAD Institute’s R implementation of Morpheus and one minus Pearson’s correlation hierarchical clustering (c). Statistically significant (p ≤ .05) differences were found for thymus chemokine/CXCL7 and sICAM (multiple t tests with Holm-Sidak correction for multiple comparisons)